Courtesy Flags

    While we were in the middle of pinching pennies, and ordering essential parts, we came across the concept of courtesy flags.  This in fact is a law, throughout the marine world, where when you enter another Countries water, you should fly their flag in order to display respect, and also to show that you agree to abide by the said countries laws.

    Now this is written in the rules and can be interpreted different ways, but the way I interpret the rules is that, a person entering another countries water will fly the Q flag until they proceed to customs, and after clearing the country you proceed to fly the countries courtesy to signify that these formalities are complete. This will show two things to the local coast guard, and if you fly this flag without clearing customs, or choose not to fly a courtesy flag can turn bad for you and your parties.  For example in Morocco they take this very seriously (so I've read).

    Being law abiding citizens as we are, and trying to avoid any trouble with law enforcement, as well as any fines that could be attached to breaking these laws; we have decided to procure all of these "courtesy flags" before we depart in December across the Atlantic into the Caribbean.  We proceeded to shop online for courtesy flags and found that an average flag would cost around 10 dollars, with groups of flags around 150 dollars.  This meaning we would need to purchase somewhere around 500 dollars in flags to get a proper set of signal flags and courtesy flags to be in compliance with the laws.  To me this was just unacceptable.

   This is our solution.  I opened paint and searched the internet for PDFs with the flags of the world on them.  I proceeded to print one side of the flag, then rotate the picture on its horizontal access and print on the other side of the flag.  Once the flag was double sided with reverse images of itself, we purchased an laminator for 20 euro, and proceeded to laminate over 100 flags, saving us countless dollars.  We will poke holes and raise these in place of the "flag", and hopefully catch little to no slack in the process.  We will report back with the reaction to the public.


The sites we used for our flag pictures are as follows.

http://www.pdfpad.com/flags/

Which is a great site, because it also separates it by areas, so you can click what is relevant to your sailing grounds.

Also for Signal Flags, we used the pictures from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_maritime_signal_flags